winbench did have directdraw tests, i believe i saw it in 3d winbench 2000 but it's probably on the earlier ones too. for using later 2d+3d cards when it comes to directdraw i suspect there's not all that many conclusions to draw here beyond random numbers on screen, since all the games should simply run, but comparisons with cards from the 1993-1995 timeframe could be rather interesting. for instance i once found that the original matrox millennium is not able to run diablo ii without issues using the default 98se driver.

i think MDK has a benchmark for win95 that's directdraw, but it might be rather stressing the CPU/RAM more than the graphics card (maybe that's actually what you are after). for benchmarking SCBW you'd probably be running some replays and using fraps (no idea if it even works in ddraw) which probably needs win2k or kernelex on 98se, and then who knows how much overhead you are looking at on those socket 7 cpus...

Final Reality can do 2D and 3D benchmarks.
Normally, it does perform both. But there's a menu that allows a selection of benchmarks.
So you can do limit to 2D, DDraw.

By the way, there are some more 2D benchmarks.. For GDI/WinG.

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My apologies for mentioning my own posts only, other Vogons also contributed awesome stuff, of course.
It's just.. I have trouble remembering their threads. Hah, I guess I'm getting slightly old. 😅

Thanks guys, both very helpful.

I'm happy with more CPU heavy benchmarks as I will be using a Voodoo 3 2000 for all computers, although I agree fraps may not work great.

I was wondering about some SC replays and maybe I could time how long they complete if they run at eg 2x speed, but maybe it would just drop frames....

I have seen Final Reality used a bit so that sounds like a good idea too. Thanks!

EDIT: I'm very interested in Pentium 133/166 vs Cyrix PR200 (150MHz) in these style of games.

if you really wanted to benchmark a game, diablo ii could work since it's one of the few (?) directdraw games that does show FPS - just enter a game, don't click anywhere, press enter and type /fps. singleplayer is capped at 25fps though i doubt the cpus you mentioned could even hit that, but it's also possible to make a LAN game, which runs uncapped; problem with LAN is that the map is re-generated every time, so you might have to fiddle with the seed command to get some repeatability.

with a capture card, it would perhaps be possible to run any footage through a framerate analysis tool, though i'm not sure if those are really available or easy to get into.